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** Daily Newsletter: DECEMBER 9, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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NATHAN PINOSKI: How Globalization Led to Tribalism ([link removed])

LUMA SIMMS: Marriage Annulment and False Mercy ([link removed])

LOUISE PERRY: We Are Repaganizing ([link removed])

Today we look at how technology shaped the Afghan war, and how immigration is bringing it to the United States. Also, Pope Leo warned that “human judgment on the nullity of marriage cannot however be manipulated by false mercy.” Luma Simms, who went through the annulment process, concurs.

Finally, an archive piece is back in circulation. I urge you to read one of the most popular articles
First Things has ever published: “We Are Repaganizing ([link removed]) .”
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** How Globalization Led to Tribalism ([link removed])
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** NATHAN PINKOSKI
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An Afghan national attacked National Gaurdsmen in D.C. This is, Pinkoski writes, the consequence of importing “people shaped by the global war on terror, shaped by the electric age.” Beyond the event, Pinkoski makes the larger point that terrorism is shaped by technology: “Just like Western youth in the megacities, Afghan youth in the urban areas were mesmerized by their own set of viral videos. Except theirs were of ISIS suicide bombers.”

For further reading: Technology shapes modernity. Mary Harrington gave an expansive, radical account of that shaping in the August/September issue: “The King and the Swarm ([link removed]) .” For Pinkoski on a different, though deeply related topic: “Actually Existing Postliberalism ([link removed]) ” (November 2024).
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** Marriage Annulment and False Mercy ([link removed])
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** LUMA SIMMS
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Luma Simms was divorced and remarried. Then she joined the Catholic Church. She wrote about the experience in 2014 (“My Plea ([link removed]) ”) and returns to the topic today to discuss a recent statement by Pope Leo XIV. She writes that “true mercy is always an affirmation of truth.”

For further reading: Gerhard Cardinal Müller wrote in 2018 about Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia: “Development, or Corruption? ([link removed]) ”
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** We Are Repaganizing ([link removed])
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** LOUISE PERRY
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Here’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

The above is how Louise Perry begins her famous 2023 essay, “We Are Repaganizing.” One of First Things most popular articles, Perry argues here that Christianity protected the West from, among other things, the mass murder of infants so common in the pagan world. As Christianity recedes from swaths of the West, we will once again find pits of babies’ bones.

Upcoming Events
* December 12, 2025: The January issue goes live.
* February 1, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida | Sarasota, FL. Details coming soon.

Until next time.


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JACOB AKEY
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Associate Editor
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